The first scholarship from the Collin Association for Sustainable Efforts, in the amount of $750, was awarded to Marielle Ngoue. She received her CASE Sustainability Scholarship for the fall 2012 semester. The scholarship enabled her to pay her tuition and for her college textbooks. Her plan is to transfer to a 4 year institution at the end of the spring 2013 semester to enroll in a pre-medicine program at either UT or Baylor. Marielle says, “This scholarship was very helpful because it showed that hard work will always pay off. I want to thank World Wear Project for providing the textile recycling bins at our college. They have impacted my academic career exponentially.”
WWP says way to go Marielle!

World Wear Project was a part of the recent Dallas Fall Recycling Roundup which took place on September 29th, 2012. If you recall that day it rained cats and dogs all day long. Luckily we were dressed for the weather, at least some of us were. We took shelter under our truck for a while so we could stay dry and ultimately took shelter under a canopy which we set up by our truck.

We had a great time accepting gently used shoes and clothing donations as the people of Dallas braved the weather to rid themselves of unwanted items such as tires, light bulbs, electronics, appliances, used books, and lots of televisions. One of the highlights of the day was the shredding truck that was located on site to shred personal documents.

We were very happy to be a part of such a great effort to keep items out of our landfills. We plan to be a part of the Roundup in the spring as well. Please visit us then, and bring your unwanted shoes and clothing. I trust that the weather will be a bit more cooperative, but if not, we’ll be prepared to handle it.

Council 11862, at St. Michael the Archangel parish in Garland found an “Outside the Box” way to support the American Wheelchair Foundation. In less than three months, a campaign to collect slightly worn shoes funded the Council's donation of six wheelchairs to the charity.

In July, 2012, the council and Dallas, TX clothing recycling company, World Wear Project, LLC created this unique fund-raiser. World Wear Project provided bins, branded with the parish and Council names and custom artwork, and placed the bins in the church narthex. Parishioners drop shoes they no longer wear in the bins. The company picks up the shoes and pays the council for the weight collected. There is no cost to the Council or the parish.

Last year we were only able to attend. This year we were able to participate. Park(ing) Day Dallas was on Friday, September 21, 2012. The weather was great, if a bit warm. There were lots of participants and plenty of Dallasites wondering just what was going on. It was Park(ing) Day Dallas, a community-focused event that challenges the definition of public space. PARK(ing) Day was developed in 2005 as a guerilla art project by Rebar and has spread from its origin in San Francisco to over 160 cities around the world (all participating on the same day). The grassroots project has been adapted by independent groups to champion creative, social or political causes relevant to individual communities. The event was brought to downtown Dallas in 2011 by area residents with a mission to be a forum for constructive change; local organizations are encouraged to partner with design talent and advocacy groups to showcase creativity and produce community-enhancing spaces.

We were able to entertain his honor, the mayor of Dallas, Mike Rawlings. He stopped by, took a seat and tweeted to his followers that he was visiting with World Wear Project. We had photo ops with other Dallas luminaries such as Romeo the Recycling Chipmunk. He dropped a pair of athletic shoes in our City of Dallas Athletic Shoe Recycling Bin.

Please enjoy our pictures, visit the Park(ing) Day Dallas website, http://www.parkingdaydallas.org, for more pictures, media coverage, and to learn how you might participate.

We had a great day at Park(ing) Day Dallas and can’t wait to participate next year. We’ll be thinking of a new and creative theme for our park(ing) space for 2013.

The City of Dallas Waste Diversion Team and World Wear Project recently partnered to begin collecting gently used athletic shoes. These shoes may be dropped off in any of the attractive green City of Dallas Waste Diversion Team bins located throughout the city. For a complete listing of the locations at which you can drop off your gently used athletic shoes, please go to www.dallascityhall.com, or call the Waste Diversion Hotline, 214-670-4475. You can also check right here on our website for locations.

Credential is an industry buzz word that refers to unsorted and untouched second-hand clothing in original bags donated by individuals. These are sometimes referred to as “original” donations. If you have ever dropped a bag of used clothes into a collection bin or brought it to a charity, that bag is filled with credential used clothing.

We collect credential used clothes in clothing collection bins we’ve placed with churches, schools, community centers and at retail shopping centers for our largest fundraising partner, D.A.R.E. America. Our fundraising partners are paid by the pound for the credential clothing we collect from their bins.

Institutional clothing on the other hand is clothing that is purchased by a textile recycling company from thrift organizations including the Salvation Army and Goodwill. Because it’s gone from a home to the institution and been sorted by that institution, it is called institutional clothing. This clothing tends to include items that couldn’t be sold in their thrift stores or is out of season.

We have a map of all of our clothing collection bin locations on our website. Feel free to drop off your shoes and clothing in any one of our bins.

One of my co-workers and I recently attended an International Council of Shopping Centers conference in Phoenix, Arizona. It was the Retail Green/CenterBuild conference attended by architects, professionals in the lighting field, contractors and shopping center developers and managers.

The purpose of us attending this conference was so that we could reach out to people in the shopping center industry who might wish to add to their bottom line by hosting a shoes and clothing donation bin on their retail shopping center property. We pay a fee each month to the shopping center owner or manager for providing a convenience to their community.

Let’s face it; most people don’t want to go too far out of their way when it comes to donating shoes and clothing. Convenience is everything. So many moms (who generally clean out closets for husbands, kids and themselves) drive around with bags full of donations in the back of their cars. When they don’t find a bin they inevitably take the donations out of the car and put them in a garage. Our goal is to place as many bins as possible for DARE America, our main non-profit partner, so that donating shoes and clothing is easy and convenient for everyone, and so donations don’t end up taking up space in the garage.

For each bin we place we pay DARE America a monthly fee. It’s a win-win-win situation for the retail shopping center owner/manager, for DARE America to fund their programs working to keep kids drug and alcohol free, and for World Wear Project. We get the shoes and clothing we need for our customers in developing nations. The last winner in that equation are the people living in developing nations who need affordable clothing.

If you’re a retail shopping manager or owner, please contact us to discuss how we can increase your bottom line by hosting a shoes and clothing collection bin on your property.

Here in the warehouse of World Wear Project the guys were recently unloading a trailer full of institutional clothing which had arrived from out of state. Somehow over the din of the forklifts moving about and the honking of the forklift horns, someone heard the mewing of a cat.

Thank goodness they heard the mewing of the cat; otherwise it could have been a disaster, for the cat and the contents of the trailer.

The guys gingerly moved some of the bales around and were able to corner the cat which had been in the container for some 5 days. She was skinny, hungry and very thirsty. Members of the office crew got her some cat food, some water, a nice warm cardboard box and some warm rags to nestle in. It all ended up with Charity the cat being adopted by one of our employees. A potential “catastrophe” avoided!

Along with a co-worker I attended the IAEM Conference in Las Vegas in November. IAEM stands for International Association of Emergency Managers. World Wear Project attended the conference because we’d like to be the go-to company for those who need to deal with what frequently happens after a primary disaster.

After a disaster, well-meaning and generous people from all over the country donate shoes and clothing to those families who’ve been displaced by an unfortunate occurrence such as a fire, flood, hurricane or tornado. How this becomes a secondary disaster for the organizations working with the donations is that the community is inundated with so much in the way of donations that they can’t deal with all of it. They frequently lack storage space, and a lot of manpower is diverted from the primary disaster to handling the secondary disaster of administering the level of donations received. Sometimes the clothing becomes mildewed or damaged in some way and ends up in local landfills.

(AP Photo/Dave Martin) Read the article by the Associated Press.
Photo: Volunteers sort through donated clothing at a warehouse full of donated goods for tornado victims in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Many people affected by the disaster would prefer to have money so that they can purchase new items. This spending at local stores helps the community get back on its feet. We want to make these types of things possible by responding to the call for help by collecting the massive amounts of donations and turning them into available funds to be distributed to the community. We’ve got our own fleet of trucks so we can truck the donations away without tying up the trucking needed for the local area. We can help by keeping all those donations out of local landfills. Volunteers are freed up to help with the recovery effort, and storage facilities are available for other purposes.

We reached a lot of people in the emergency manager community with our message during the conference. In fact on the Disaster Zone blog on the Emergency Management website, author Eric Holdeman blogged about what we can provide he titled Avoiding the Landfill. We’re members of the IAEM and we’re here to help in a disaster.